Recent content by MWink64

I'd like to see a link as well. I'm also skeptical of the speed claim, since it exceeds even the theoretical maximum of the SATA bus.

My personal preference is to use a large drive, with a small partition for the OS. That way, you can reinstall the OS without having to wipe the whole drive.

Are you sure you picked the right boot device? You may have to select the (FAT) UEFI volume on the thumb drive, rather than the thumb drive itself. This is my thought as well. I'd check the drive's SMART report and perform some diagnostics.

It sounds like the drive is dying. Have you checked the SMART details? The chances of this working aren't great but here's what I'd try: 1. Connect the SSD to a PC via SATA (not USB). 2. Boot to a live Linux session (or at least an OS not on the drive in question). 3. Let the system sit, fully...

Don't waste your time or money. Don't trust guarantees, especially from obvious scammers. You're simply not going to get that lucky. It IS a scam. Doing a firmware update on a drive requires you to actually have appropriate firmware and a way to apply it. I understand your attitude of...

Some companies default to using the date of manufacture to determine warranty coverage. Even without a receipt, it may be worth looking into. You know it's too good to be true, so why are you considering it? There's nearly zero chance that drive actually has a 4TB capacity. It's likely been...

If the drive is maintaining a 100% activity level, that suggests it's the bottleneck.

The results aren't quite as bad as I expected but your description does sound similar to my experience with some drives using the same controller. Unfortunately, the only solution I found was to rewrite all the data. Even then, it was only a temporary solution. As for the pSLC filling up...

How full is it? How much are you writing to it at one time? Do you know if TRIM is enabled and functioning? It's quite possible the pSLC cache is filling up. Since it's a DRAM-less QLC drive, when you exceed what the cache can handle, performance will absolutely tank. See this review. If it's...

That sounds like the pSLC cache is filling up. These drives have a huge drop in write speed when that happens. It can sometimes take hours of (mostly) idle time to flush it to TLC/QLC. Do you know if TRIM is enabled and working? Though, I'm not sure this is related to your main issue. Here's...

Where did you hear that?

It's perfectly fine to run them 24/7.

The 860 EVO is SATA. V-NAND is just Samsung's name for 3D NAND (BiCS is another). Virtually all modern SSDs use 3D NAND. It has absolutely no bearing on the interface. I'll agree that the firmware update probably isn't especially important. I haven't updated mine and vaguely recall the...

This looks potentially like more of a software issue than a hardware one. The Task Manager screenshot shows something thrashing the drive, transferring GBs of data. You should watch the Processes tab and see what program is doing that. The fact that it's now writing at ~6MB/s tells me that it's...

There's two ways to look at it. If this is just a backup drive, and everything it contains is still on another fully functional drive, it's time to act, not panic. As for this drive, it's a goner. With that SMART report, it's very bad. It's even tripped SMART, which doesn't even happen in many...